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    Minecraft Middle Earth is a Minecraft community that recreates the world described by JRR Tolkien and his writings. Everyone can participate in organized events in which we collaborate to create major landmarks, terrain, caves, castles, towns, farms and more.

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Discord vs. Forums, Where is the line?

Discord vs. Forums, Where is the line?

Hello all, recently we had a merge of all of our official daughter discord servers into the main MCME server. Why was this done you ask? Simply for better management as already discord messages get lost and are hard to find. We Valar as a whole felt this was the best thing to do for the server.

Discord is a great tool but in recent weeks I have been seeing it abused. The off-topic chats that go on in almost every channel has to stop. We have supplied you with enough areas which are suitable for this so don't abuse the system. Another thing I saw, most last week than this, was constant arguments, inappropriate behaviour and just blatant disregard for any rules whatsoever... yeah, I only have one thing to say to that, if we see it again: you will be muted and we will take action.

Another thing I would like to raise up is about discord vs forums. Here is a lovely written message by our very own q220:
know people these days yearn for instant gratification/response (I suppose thats what they mean with the facebook generation? :p), which is actually a part of the problem: most people don't 'scroll up' to find information and thus tend to ask the same stuff multiple times. However this fast response is also beneficiary in some cases when trying to do something normal minecraft chat isn't good for (think posting pictures of something you try to explain, or having a less cluttered chat when giving someone help to install the resource pack). Though forums have more benefits to handle information:

Content stays visible longer due to the structure of a forum, compared to a chatroom.

Topics/threads are threaded and thus 'collect' related information together, while discord you'd have to skimread if people chat through each other. Forums also can inform people better when they would start bothering using the search function.

Since the site is our primary source of traffic, keeping it active is beneficiary for everyone. New people will get the impression the project is alive and kicking.

Users also have to put in more mental effort before starting a message (thinking before speaking), which increases communication (what info do I want? what info do other people need to help me? how can i ... etc)

Not to forget, more content on the site means more love from Google, which in turn means higher potential to attract members because of organic search results.

Being in charge of our own content also is better since we can do with it what we want (be it backing it up, moving it or whatever) while using Discord for prolonged time would mean it becomes harder and harder to get away from it because there are no ways to export or assert control of your own content (which isn't yours anymore)

Since people also expect these 'instant responses' when direct messaging or tagging people, this can lead to increased stress for some people since they can start feeling obligated or pressured to immediately give a result. Forums are more of a 'I'll get to it when I can - be it on the train or on the toilet'. Also it's pretty annoying having to return to the same Discord server to mute the newly added channel because of @everyone or whoever tagging, only to find out it's something you don't like > mute again = less user reach.

The point wouldn't be to replace Discord with the forums, just have Discord handle the small talk/banter/quick chats, while having the forums for projects, discussions, decision making etc

We do not want to discourage you from using discord, but we would much rather you used it as a quick chatroom than for a place to plan and establish big ideas.

A message to Building Ranks by Eriol:
1526355906875.webp

So with all that said, please take what we have said into account and have a good rest of the week.
 

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